Friday, October 26, 2007

This has been an incredible journey. I can honestly say this has been the hardest decision of my life, and it just kills me to have to decide who gets to stay... and who has to go home. I really hate to say goodbye to these amazing paragraphs, but I had to look inside my heart and find the first paragraphs I really connected with on an emotional level. Thank you to all of you for being here tonight.

(deep breath)

I only have 7 roses to give out tonight.

But first, let me discuss with the camera in a pained voice some of the things that helped me make my decision.

While I met over 600 beautiful women er, paragraphs in the course of this journey, some of them just weren't in it for the right reasons. Here are some of the things I was looking for, and a few of the reasons some of the paragraphs did not receive a rose this evening (besides the fact that some of the paragraphs had shotgun-wielding fathers).

I crave originality. When establishing a world in a first paragraph, it is so so so important to avoid cliches and sentence crutches. One easy way of telling if you're using one of these is to run a "find" in the comments section for key phrases in your paragraph. For instance, Chris, I hate to single these lovely paragraphs out but the phrase "the last thing X expected" was used five times.

Also, trust is just so important in a relationship, and I really had a lot of respect for the first paragraphs who trusted me as a reader. Some of the paragraphs who will not receive roses tonight had too many redundant words of emphasis. When they said something unexpected, they followed up with superfluous emphasis, as in "No, really." or "Literally." or "Seriously." or "I'm not talking about this, I'm talking about THIS" You have to trust the reader to recognize when something is surprising, and if you do have to qualify it, it means you probably could have written it better the first time.

Lastly, I found myself attracted to first paragraphs who didn't try too hard -- they didn't try too hard to be literary, and they weren't too chatty. A healthy middle ground is simply amazing.

Let me tell you -- it took hours and hours to go through the entrants to pick finalists, and I seriously cannot thank May enough for her help. For the love of all things Bachelor, please subscribe to Good Girl Lit, buy THE BOOK OF JANE, and express your appreciation to May -- this was a tremendous task, and the mere thought of trying to choose finalists without May gives me hives. Not that I get hives. Moving on.

Oh no, it's some kind of infestation, Rosemary thought, prodding the ground with her boot. Next to the barn were several fist-sized holes, just big enough for rats, or worse, imps. She hated imps. They were always getting into the larder and causing a fuss.

The third rose.... goes to eric:

There’s this girl I’ve never met that I know everything in the world about. Well, most everything. Not the big stuff, I guess. Like what she prayed about when she would cry at her bedside or whether she really believed those prayers might get answered. And I never knew all of the reasons for the crazy shit she did, but hey, who really does? I did know other stuff though. The real freaky-deaky shit. Like how she would crack open her father’s disposable razors with a pair of pliers she kept stashed behind her dresser and how she’d slice herself up. Sometimes I think she left her window blinds open that way just so somebody, anybody, me--a guy she never met--would know. Not that she was some kind of attention whore. Just about everybody is some kind of attention whore. Not Scissors, though. And I could testify in court to that, since, I’m like, some kind of authority on the girl.

The fourth rose.... goes to CC:

Brooklyn didn't know very much about me. Actually, the girl knew surprisingly little, which was exactly what I needed in a friend. She didn't ask intrusive questions and I didn't have to lie or have my heart pound while I searched for acceptable answers. She wasn't into meaningful conversation and heartfelt talks. She was light, snappy, and never depressed. And most importantly, she wasn't my responsibility.

The fifth rose.... goes to Emily Ryan-Davis:

Life inside a piano isn’t all knitting cobweb sweaters and napping. It’s dangerous. Every time a clumsy student flings himself at the bench and bangs on the ivories, just to see his fingers walk across the black and whites, I face death. The action’s unpredictable. If I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could lose my head.

The sixth rose.... goes to Aden:

He was short and skinny, shorter than the others, and never wore a shirt when he ran. His thin arms flailed as he kept ahead of us and we all wondered how. He was so fast. But mostly we watched the bouncing scars on his back and thought about how he got them. We called him the Wizard. It was because of his hair, wild black mass with a white shock hanging in the front. That’s how I thought of him. The Wizard. I wish I knew what names they had given him but I never asked. Between us, there was an unspoken rule: everything would remain unspoken.

Chris Harrison: "Paragraphs, Bachelor... this is the final rose this evening."

The last and final rose.... goes to Regan:

The great flaw in the system was that some of the Children remembered what it felt like when they were taken. It was impossible to tell who would remember--temperament, age, gender, none of them seemed to matter. The flaw persisted despite all of the technicians' attempts to eradicate it. In rare cases a Child, newly imprinted, would awaken at odd hours of the night, crying for reasons she couldn't explain or shaking with a nameless dread and a desperate feeling that something wasn't right.

Chris Harrison: "Paragraphs, Bachelor.... If you did not receive a rose this evening, please take a moment.. and say your goodbyes."

IF YOU RECEIVED A ROSE TONIGHT: please e-mail me at nb@cbltd.com -- you are entitled to a query critique. I know some of you don't need a query critique because you're all agented and everything, but we'll figure something to properly reward your awesomeness so e-mail me anyway.

Now is the time for voting. Here are the procedures:

In the comments section of THIS POST, please vote for your favorite paragraph. Anonymous votes will not be counted, so please either sign in to Blogger or use your real name. Please do not openly campaign for yourself or others on the Internet or via e-mail (this is a meritocracy), and irregular voting activity will be monitored and mercilessly punished.

Thank you so much to everyone who entered -- I really appreciate that everyone put themselves out there by entering, the response was seriously overwhelming. And trust me, it was ridiculously difficult to pick finalists -- there were many close calls and tough decisions.

thank you may and nathan for doing this!! great choices, as my brain could not cope with reading all the entries. there just aren't enough little grey cells in there. so i can only imagine how difficult your task was.

i choose sophie w's opening.

REASON : i prefer reading in the third person pov. it is a short and simple entry and manages to stir intrigue with merely a few sentences. i wanted to know more about the imps! in hindsight of choosing, it is similar to my own para submitted. short and from third pov.

[Sigh.] I thought he would like me. I thought for sure we'd connect. Maybe my voice was just a little too sassy for his taste. I guess it wasn't meant to be. [Stares teary-eyed off to the right of the camera.)

He's the only one from Nathan's list that's on my list (see my blog for my own favorites).

Conduit still rocks!

*shake my booty*

Aden? I just didn't understand this paragraph at all. Can scars bounce? I get what Aden was trying to convey, but still thought the image was off. Is this a kid? Implied by some of the description, but black hair with a white streak? Was this a dog, but then I remembered the "arms." Nice emotional feel to this paragraph, but I was still confused.

May and I definitely were cognizant about choosing more 1st person than 3rd, and we really don't have a preference between the two, but if you look at the entries there seemed to be more 1st person paragraphs, which I think is ultimately reflected in the split between 1st/3rd among the finalists.

Sophie W, Emily Davis-Ryan, and Aden all gave awesome paragraphs, and I hope to read those books some day, but since I can only choose one, I have to pick Regan. Right away, first time I read it, I wanted to know what it was all about.

Thank you so much, Nathan and May, for taking the incredible amount of time needed to do this!

Wow, what a tough decision! My two favorites are Emily and Regan. I'd keep reading both, and while Regan's seems more like my type of book, I'm voting for Emily. Very well written and I want to know about that spider.

Nathan and May, kudos for all your hard work and I love the presentation this morning.

I have no idea what this was or what in the heck people are voting for. But it sounds fun, and I'm hoping there will be another "bachelor-writing-rose-voting-thingy" that I can particpate in next time. I'll keep my eye out!

The only thing that gives me pause is whether there's enough action inside a piano to sustain an entire story. However, the tone of this paragraph is just so wonderful--funny, quirky, full of danger and the unexpected--that I trust the writer to deliver.

In the Great Voice category, I would like to mention Eric too. Regan seems to have the most promising plot, but the voice didn't grab me quite as much as Emily's or Eric's.

Well, I'm rather surprised. Most of these didn't do a whole lot for me. I would've put all but two of them back on the shelf.I'll vote for Emily. That one's my favorite. (But Regan, if you read this, I liked yours, too.)

Why do people gotta snipe at the finalists? If you liked others that didn't make the list, just cite them, no need to be dismissive or critical of the people who made the list -- let's keep things positive.

Oh my God, Nathan. This made my day. Homecoming game was cancelled, the girl's game was cancelled, Homecoming might be delayed and I have two tests on Monday (after Homecoming!?), so basically life sucks for me right now...

And then I saw this blog post and my life is no longer beating me over the head. I will triumph over Homecoming Blues and destroy those tests! I CAN DO ANYTHING!

I don't know about everyone else, but when I tried reading through the original entries, I seemed to like nearly everything I read, or dislike everything... depending on my mood more than the paragraphs themselves. Weird.

The finalists are all great! But if I have to pick just one... I vote for Emily Ryan-Davis.

I'd take Sophie W's book home with me. Such a casual, off-hand treatment of an unusual situation - catches my attention immediately.

It took me 'til this morning to get past the excitement of seeing my own paragraph to focus long enough to read the other finalists. :) Congratulations and good luck to everybody!

Am I allowed to give an e-mail address? Some voters mentioned they'd like to say why they voted, and I'm curious! If I'm not allowed, I'll take my flogging like a big girl. If I am allowed, my e-mail address is emily.ryandavis @ gmail.com

But they are all excellent! I'd happily keep reading others, and a bunch that didn't make the short-list as well.

Thanks for the contest, Nathan!

PS re Josephine on Aden's wizard... I know someone with a white streak in their dark hair. She's had it all her life, which is how long I've known her. So while fiction might need to be more believable than reality, a streak in a kid's hair is not unrealistic. Just in case Aden was getting worried!

The pickings were never this good on The Bachelor. They're all damn fine paragraphs. So were many of the others--so many I couldn't list them all before the voting deadline, so I'll have to love them privately.

My vote goes to CC. There's an emotional sophistication in this paragraph that I love to find in a YA.

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